11/04/2005

The mobile phone giant has created an open source browser for smartphones and intends to work closer with the developer community.

Nokia has teamed up with Safari to deliver an open source Web browser for its S60 smartphone software platform.

Nokia says the browser, which will be made available to other companies licensing the S60 platform for their own smartphones, will give users a better surfing experience. It is designed to display Web pages on a phone exactly as they look on a monitor.

The browser includes pop-up blocking, access to RSS feeds and a text search feature. It uses components from Apple's Safari Web Kit ? the open source engine for mobile devices based on KHTML ? and KJS from KDE's Konqueror open source project.

Nokia announced back in June that it was developing an open source browser for phones that uses its S60 platform. It now hopes that other S60 licensees and the open source community will develop new features for the browser. S60 application developers can also use open APIs to build on top of the browser.